


It's half-past the moonlight

by anothernonstop



Category: NCT (Band)
Genre: Alcohol, Alternate Universe - College/University, Established Relationship, Light Angst, M/M, johnny is a Fool, lots of indulgent reminiscence, minimal academics maximal relaxing on the beach, photographer!taeyong, unestablished relationship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-17
Updated: 2017-07-17
Packaged: 2018-12-03 06:48:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,317
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11526798
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/anothernonstop/pseuds/anothernonstop
Summary: Jaehyun loves having sand in his mouth and salt in his hangnail and sun in his eyes because it means he’s home. They’re all suspended in the strange liminality that is college life: their dorms and apartments are transitory and their childhood homes expect their absence, bedrooms converted into offices and families falling into new rhythms. Every place that might be called home is temporary or outgrown, but this little patch of beach is permanent and here, Jaehyun is ageless.





	It's half-past the moonlight

**Author's Note:**

> set in california. i aged everyone to the same year in college for simplicity's sake. nothing too raunchy in here, but warning for alcohol and language. title from the song plage by crystal fighters.

Jaehyun wonders if he’s the first person to ever enjoy the feeling of sand between his teeth. Maybe not the feeling itself, but what the feeling signifies. He knows that the childlike satisfaction of his jaw crunching closed, grains of sand like bland pop rocks, means he’s done. It means he can wash the ink off his hands with seawater and forget every word of notes he pretended to take in stats. Right now, he craves it as though his body is deficient in some critical nutrient.

It’s a Friday and he’s the last one to hit the beach. Well, he and Taeyong, more accurately. After his last class, he’d rushed to pick up Taeyong from their shared apartment, all rolling stops and speed limits reinterpreted as suggestion rather than law.

Right now, he’s a getaway driver speeding away from the ruin of their week: the process of Jaehyun switching majors from Business to Music, Taeyong’s final portfolio. All the shuffled papers of academic bureaucracy, the bloodshot eyes of excessive caffeinating and insufficient sleep.

Taeyong sits placidly in the passenger seat, the strap of his camera slung around his neck, hand reaching over to rest, distractingly, on Jaehyun’s thigh. 

They chat idly as the PCH slips by and Jaehyun registers the highway in bits and pieces. He sees tinted windows and the pristine glimmer of the late afternoon sun and cirrus clouds like unwound spools of thread. He sees Taeyong’s face in profile, Taeyong’s slim fingers flicking through the settings on his camera with practiced ease.

“How was class?” Taeyong asks.

“I think I remember something about the Poisson distribution? But then I’m like, pretty sure poisson means fish in French so that just made me think about the beach, which made me think about you on the beach, which made me think about kissing you on the beach.” Jaehyun winces, taking a turn a little too fast and a little too wide.

Taeyong’s face settles into a mask of faux severity, tongue clicking behind a barely-suppressed smile. “What if you become a statistician one day and the Poisson distribution is critical to a new project you’re working on? Then your boss will think you’re incompetent and you’ll get fired because you were thinking about kissing me on the beach during the Poisson lesson in college, and then how will we pay the mortgage on our future home?”

Jaehyun is chuckling now, dimple on his cheek deepening. “Well. First of all, if I become a statistician, I’ll ask you to put me out of my misery a long time before my boss can ever fire me. Second of all, I’m sure you’ll be making enough from your prosperous photography career to support us by then.”

Taeyong knows Jaehyun’s joking, but it still makes him blush. Most of the time, when his photography major comes up during small talk at some sweaty, bass-heavy frat party Ten dragged everyone to, he gets a smirk, as if the stranger he’s talking to knows something he doesn’t. As if they’re experiencing a clairvoyant episode, catching a glimpse of Taeyong’s camera collecting dust on his desk a decade down the line. As if they’re envisioning the trajectory of his eventual resignation to tedious spreadsheets, a claustrophobic cubicle, a soul-deadening commute. He’s had family members outright scoff when he drops the word “photographer” in the middle of their interrogations about career aspirations. 

A spiteful cop shining a bright light into a suspect’s face. Self-satisfied smile after obtaining the confession. 

But never with Jaehyun. 

Jaehyun has been an ardent supporter ever since Taeyong got his first DSLR for his fourteenth birthday. He’d pointed out flowerbeds on their walks home from school, unusual cloud formations, anything he thought may be worthy of photographing. He’d bitterly wished that his allowance was generous enough for him to buy the macro lens Taeyong had mentioned wanting. He’d pictured showing up to school one day with it cradled in his hands, watching Taeyong screw it into the camera, being the indirect cause of his awe. 

At college, Taeyong had gone into the first meeting with his academic advisor intent on announcing his plan to major in Economics. Neutral, practical, and all wrong. Instead, he’d come back to the dorm room he and Jaehyun had shared their freshman year, run his hand nervously through his hair, and said “I’m not going to major in econ. I’m doing photography.”

Jaehyun didn’t crack a single joke about the uselessness of fine arts degrees. Just nodded, smiled wide and genuine, said “I think that’s a great idea.”

They’d spent many nights after that up late, whispering about pipe dreams, using their fingertips to trace the stripes of light that filtered through the blinds and painted their wall like the solid yellow lines on a two-lane road. Jaehyun has never even entertained the notion that Taeyong will prove the skeptics correct. He thinks the pipe dreams Taeyong shares with him at night are less like pipe dreams and more like sensible goals, and he tells Taeyong as much. 

Taeyong talks about doing some freelance work on campus, maybe senior pictures or something. A summer photography program he’s been thinking of applying for at Parsons in New York. Every new idea makes Jaehyun prop himself up on his elbow so he can see Taeyong better when he tells him “do it. You should do it.” Taeyong could probably tell him that he wants to do a creative photo series featuring moldy bread and Jaehyun would still tell him to do it. It’s a profound comfort to Taeyong, coming home to someone with so much faith after a harsh project evaluation or a frustrating darkroom session. 

Taeyong and Jaehyun have been together since high school. They, Johnny, and Ten are the only ones who knew each other before college, the rest gradually gravitating together; naturally susceptible to Johnny and Ten’s charms and the allure of the beach.

Since the first week of freshman year, Johnny and Ten have left the university campus at three o’clock sharp every Friday, regardless of afternoon classes or impending exams. Johnny perpetually keeps a beach bag packed in the back of the shitty car he’s dubbed the Beast. He named it years and years ago, right after buying it with the meager earnings he collected working as a ticket taker at a movie theater. He and Ten are the only ones allowed to complain about the Beast’s squeaky brakes and its noisy engine; Johnny warns anyone else who dares slander it that the Beast may hear, and that the Beast is capable of retaliation. 

Every week, he and Ten meet up at the same parking spot, hopping in as though there are tweed-clad professors in hot pursuit. They were both serial class-skippers back in high school and never quite shook the adrenaline rush that came with leaving their seat in the classroom empty, even in college, where attendance is no longer enforced and no one in the class will bat an eye if they’re only spotted on final exam day.

Sometimes, Doyoung joins them, if they manage to break through his studious determination and convince him that Friday night is not the time to write papers. More than once, Jaehyun has seen Ten flash Doyoung a sweet smile, waxing poetic about the fleetingness of life, about how he’ll absolutely remember getting trashed on the beach with his best friends when he’s forty but he’ll never remember conducting literary analysis of D.H. Lawrence’s depictions of sexuality in The Rainbow. And why would he want to anyway? “If you went out with us more you could be analyzing your own depictions of sexuality, Doyoung.”

Sometimes, Yuta joins them, especially when Johnny is desperate for cheap alcohol. They’re all sophomores, not quite old enough to make their own runs to the ABC store and most of them rarely venture outside their insular social circle. But Yuta has close connections with upperclassmen through the debate team, having bonded with them on long bus rides upstate and long airplane rides across the country to prestigious speech and debate competitions. He takes whatever they’ll buy for him, keeping bottles of cotton candy flavored Pinnacle and dented cans of PBR tucked between the towels in his beach bag. Yuta is much more dedicated to debate team practices than Johnny and Ten are to their classes, and he’s not as susceptible to Ten’s manipulation as Doyoung is, so he misses some Fridays. But he’s always there when Johnny has had a rough week.

And Johnny has had a rough week.

Jaehyun can tell when he parks the Jeep far enough off the highway that no passing cars will see it, wades through a wall of beach grass, and greets everyone by collapsing on the sand, dramatically exalting the sweet deliverance of Friday afternoons. Johnny already has a red solo cup in his hand and he’s subdued, doesn’t laugh at Jaehyun the way the rest of them do. 

Yuta steps over Jaehyun, good-naturedly rolling his eyes at the spectacle of his arrival. “Now that you bums are finally here, me and Ten are gonna go catch some waves.” Even though they basically live on this beach, Yuta and Ten are the only two out of all of them who know how to surf. Yuta because he is, infuriatingly, good at just about everything. And Ten, because he’s graceful enough to keep his balance. His dance major serves him well as he moves in tandem with the way the water wrinkles and collapses; a sort of dance in and of itself. 

As Yuta and Ten mount their boards – stomachs to feet – Johnny still sits, swirling whatever is left of his drink around and around in the cup, peering at it as though it has some soothing message to convey if only he looks hard enough. 

Jaehyun knows him too well not to be worried. 

~*~

The sun is suspended low in the sky now; a rare coin or a tossed Frisbee. At once untouchably valuable and touchingly familiar. Johnny imagines it would be lightweight as a communion wafer. Imagines pinching it between forefinger and thumb, placing it on Ten’s tongue. Would it dissolve and illuminate him from the inside, glowing red as a hand cupped over the head of a flashlight?

He’s already a little drunk. Right after getting to the beach, he’d mixed himself a toxic-smelling concoction of vodka and bottled apple juice that had been rolling around in the backseat of the Beast for weeks. He was perhaps too frequent and too generous with the swigs he took because now the world seems overlaid by the snowy screen on a TV tuned to the wrong input. Static of the waves at low tide. Black and white fuzz as he pushes the heels of his hands into his eyes.

Down by the water’s edge, surfboard discarded, Ten is standing absolutely still. Johnny remembers Ten telling him that his mom used to take him to the beach when he was a little kid, teaching him how to fly a kite and remove orange peels in one piece. Ten used to be afraid of the ocean, unsettled by the opacity of the water. He pictured venomous sea snakes and high-voltage electric eels washing up and twining themselves around his ankles. 

His mom listened to these fears patiently before taking his little hand and leading him down to where water met sand. She told him that he didn’t have to swim, didn’t even have to do more than submerge his feet. She taught him that if he stayed in the same place for long enough, his feet would disappear under wet sand and rushes of chilled saltwater. Every time a wave came up, the chaos of seaweed and broken shells swirled around for a moment, igniting Ten’s panic, akin to other imagined threats like shadowy monsters lurking in his bedroom closet. But always, the debris surged back out, and Ten stood unharmed. As the sand accumulated on top of his feet, heavier and heavier, he used to imagine that if he waited long enough, the beach would swallow him entirely. 

Johnny remembers when Ten told him this story. It was one afternoon back in high school when there was a comparative government test neither of them had studied for, so they’d fucked off to the beach instead. They sat, passing bags of snack food back and forth and dreamily scooping up handfuls of sand just to watch it filter through their fingers.

Their conversation was light, shallow, until Johnny remembered how close they were to graduating. It was senior year and an awareness of the finite amount of time they had left together struck him brutally and too often. He hadn’t known until April that he and Ten would be attending the same college. Hadn’t even known that Ten had applied to schools in-state at all until Ten had walked into Johnny’s kitchen unannounced, holding up his acceptance letter emblazoned with the insignia of the school Johnny had already committed to. Johnny had always assumed that Ten would go to some elite conservatory across the country, dancing to songs that he would never hear. Miserably, he pictured Ten bundled up with a big scarf wound around his throat, eyes twinkling as he pushed through crowds in some bustling, high-strung metropolis on the East coast. He pictured Ten sleeping with men who were not him, holding the hand of a boyfriend who was not him, and felt his stomach knot up like the necklaces his sister untangled with nimble fingers. But there was no untangling his dread at the thought of he and Ten drifting apart like so many high-school-best-friends turned barely-acquaintances. There was no untangling him from the possibility that Ten could love him. His hope was a many-tentacled beast that kept him paralyzed, terrified.

That day at the beach he’d asked Ten what he was going to do after high school ended. His voice wavered a little, betraying his fear that Ten would supply an answer he did not want to hear.

Ten had sighed, said “everyone keeps asking that like they expect me to know for sure.” He drew meaningless symbols in the sand as he spoke. “And I don’t. Everyone else does, but I don’t.” His doubt made him uncharacteristically somber.

“I don’t expect you to know. I just.” Johnny couldn’t meet Ten’s eyes while he said this. “Don’t know what I’m gonna do without you.” 

Ten had regarded him for a long moment that Johnny spent with his legs curled up to his chest, feeling small despite his size. That was when Ten had launched into the story about his mother, about his fear of water, about his vanishing feet.

“I kind of want to do that now,” Ten had admitted, arms hugging his own waist as if in some attempt at comfort. “Stand there for a while and see how high up the sand would get. It’d be really nice to disappear right about now.”

“But then who will skip school with me?” Johnny joked. “Who will indulge my poor impulse control?” He was grasping at air, trying to lighten what seemed an impossibly heavy weight, bearing down on them both with little mercy. His jokes were grief disguised as humor.

Now, he keeps his eyes trained on Ten’s back and thinks about that time of uncertainty. He mentally bludgeons himself for being too cowardly to confess, even after learning they would be together at college, even after spending a whole year together as roommates. He observes the line of Ten’s body, just an artful ink blot standing bravely against sun and sea.

Out of the corner of his eye, he sees Jaehyun approaching then falling gracelessly into the sand beside Johnny and wordlessly passing him a beer. 

“Thanks,” Johnny says, pulling the tab on the can back and taking a long, ill-advised pull. His eyes travel right back to Ten, who has now extracted his feet from their watery shrines and is further out to sea, trying unsuccessfully to dunk Yuta’s head underwater. Johnny can hear the cadence of his laugh from the shore. Feels it almost. 

Jaehyun, crease between his eyebrows, asks “dude. You good?” though he already knows the answer. 

Johnny answers “no”; he doesn’t have the energy to spin any other answer into something convincing. He knows, between the alcohol and the self-loathing, it’s inevitable that he’ll tell Jaehyun what’s wrong, blow his cover again. 

Taeyong already knows. Something about him made it easy for Johnny to admit the secret that’s been stagnating in his chest, collecting ache and decay for years. Something about his eyes looked perceptive, as if he already knew how Johnny felt about Ten without even being told. Something about the way he carries himself with quiet dignity in grim situations made him seem like the perfect confidant. Of course, he’d never breathed a word of it to anyone. Not even Jaehyun, who now looks like he’s waiting for Johnny to tell him why, exactly, he’s not “good”. 

Johnny remembers the moment he realized how he felt with a kind of vivid clarity that seems almost too detailed to be accurate. A fever dream that feels just like reality until the jolt and the waking. 

He was twelve. They were sitting on Johnny’s bedroom floor and Ten had just come out to him, a flat “I’m gay,” as though he was already resigned to the reality of it, resigned to the probable reality of Johnny’s horror. Johnny gaped. Not in disgust or shock, but rather because it hit him all at once. It hit him that Ten liked boys, Johnny was a boy, and the rapid-fire of his heartbeat spelled out his hope Ten liked him specifically. This was an entirely new revelation to grapple with, clumsily and cotton-mouthed. 

He’d managed to pull himself together long enough to piece together an indistinct mash of “that’s totally cool, I’m so happy you trusted me enough to tell me, any guy is gonna be lucky to have you.”

But, he remembers, when Ten stepped off his front porch with a wave over his shoulder and a reassured smile, Johnny had closed the door and cried. Maybe from the happiness of his best friend entrusting him with his deepest secret, but more likely out of some premonitory knowledge that he was not courageous enough for this kind of burden. Maybe he’d sensed right then that his feelings would go unspoken for as long as they have. Maybe he’d sensed, in that empty foyer, the ocean and the intoxication and the despair of this very day, dreading the impending years of silent wistfulness. 

Because here he still sat, just as shell-shocked as he was on that very first day. It’s not that he can’t believe he has feelings, it’s that he can’t believe their scope.

Johnny’s feelings for Ten are more logical than anything else, really. The fear is only an afterthought. They make sense together. If Taeil was to calculate the progression of their relationship, check the accuracy in a mathematical proof, he would come away nodding his head and saying “yes, I’m sure this is right”. Yes, he double-checked. If Yuta was to argue the case for their love in a debate competition, his competitors would shuffle their papers nervously, put their lips to the microphone, and concede his point.

“Johnny.” Jaehyun is next to him, snapping his fingers. “You still with me?”

“Yeah. Yeah, sorry.”

“What’s wrong?”

“It’s Ten.” Another swig of beer. “I’ve loved him since I was like…god, how old even was I. Like, fucking twelve years old. He had another breakup this week and I just kind of. Realized that I think I’ll die if he ever has a relationship that doesn’t lead to a breakup like a week after they start dating. It’s really fucking me up this time.”

“You should go for it.” Jaehyun produces this response as quickly as he does when he’s lying beside Taeyong in bed, listening to him talk about a new project or opportunity he’s considered pursuing. “Johnny, please go for it. Jesus Christ, why have you even waited this long?” 

Johnny’s confession makes Jaehyun remember the days leading up to his own breaking point with Taeyong. The first time Jaehyun kissed him, Taeyong was sitting on the hood of the Jeep, shifting his weight and giggling at how the metal dented but always righted itself again. Jaehyun was barefoot on the parking lot pavement, anxiously scanning the area for lingering classmates crushing illicit beer cans beneath their feet, couples pulling up for a nighttime stroll, the lifeguard climbing wearily into his car at the end of a long shift, anyone at all. But their solitude did nothing to embolden him. He still chewed at the inside of his cheek, rolled loose pieces of gravel beneath the toe of his shoe, dug crescent moons into his palms with blunt fingernails. He was more tremble than boy. 

He remembers everything about the way Taeyong looked that night. His old camp t-shirt with the lettering almost worn away completely. His hair, black and grown out longer than usual; a nuisance to keep pushing back away from his eyes. His skin, tanned deep from the sunshine.

He thinks about what might have happened if he had never suffocated the fear in his body for long enough to kiss Taeyong all those years ago. Tries to erase the memories of them together after Taeyong had hopped off the hood of that car with a smile strung wide across his face and his palms pressed flat against the small of Jaehyun’s back. 

He tries to forget the nights Taeyong snuck through the high-up windows of his basement, landing gracelessly and pressing the heel of his hand against his mouth to muffle his laughter. Tries to forget the way they clumsily kissed in that subterranean secrecy, keeping their ears perked for wayward family members who may discover them with untucked shirts and unkempt hair. 

He tries to forget the way it had felt to unlock their apartment for the first time, the reality of their newfound freedom clicking with the latch. That day, they kissed with the windows open, pressed each other up against the thin walls so their neighbors might hear, reveled in the renunciation of stealth and silence, savored the knowledge that they would never introduce each other as just friends again. 

He tries to forget, but finds he can’t. He loathes the thought of Johnny erasing memories with Ten before he’s allowed them to happen. He wants Johnny to have what he and Taeyong have. He wants all his friends to have something so unshakeable. Someone to fall asleep with when they’ve all returned home at the end of the day, left with the phantom feeling of sunlight on their skin.

He repeats himself, “you should go for it”. Thinks for a moment. Corrects himself. “You need to go for it”.

And Johnny does.

~*~

Even after all these years, the bonfires put Johnny on edge. Something about the way the wood collapses in on itself without warning. Creaks from a house settling in the middle of the night, mistaken for intruders and ghouls.

“Did you get any good shots of us?” Yuta and Ten are crowded around the tiny screen on Taeyong’s camera, watching him scroll through pictures of Jaehyun mid-laugh, Johnny looking broodingly into the horizon, Taeil sculpting a sandcastle with scientific precision. 

“There were like no waves today” Taeyong says, swatting Yuta’s hand away from the controls. “you were basically just boogie-boarding.” 

“Yeah, but we looked great doing it.” Ten winks at Taeyong, who purses his lips in annoyance, switching off the camera. 

Taeyong sighs. “Yuta, go get the stuff out,” waving him away. An insect buzzing too close to his ear. 

And like a magician, Yuta pulls supplies out of his bag. Dove-like marshmallows tossed across the circle, ribbon after colorful ribbon of beer cans and glass bottles.

The last traces of purple have been stamped out. The sky is just a dark void punctuated by the moon now. The fire grows higher, Doyoung dutifully throwing more logs in when it starts to wane. He hardly ever drinks, often ponders how many absurd and destructive fiascos his presence has prevented. He’s always the DD, the voice of reason, the “no” that they need to hear when everyone starts talking about skinny dipping in the sea or trying to spear washed-up chunks of jellyfish and toast them over the fire.

The laughter gets more raucous, the tide gets higher, Ten seems to appear less real. He doesn’t have a single sharp edge; the glow softens him into a corona of light that shifts as he doubles over in laughter, contracts in moments of stillness. It’s all very beautiful and cinematic and Johnny can’t take it anymore. 

“Hey Ten!” he shouts across the circle. He’s impressed with his own ability to feign normalcy. “I think I see a big snow crab down the beach, wanna check it out?” Johnny isn’t even sure snow crabs live in California, and he’s certain he’s never heard of a crab large enough to spot from any significant distance. But Ten doesn’t question him. He’s always game, always ready to play along.

“Sure!” Ten stands, brushing sand and dirt from the seat of his pants, passing off his cup to Jaehyun, who looks like the last thing he needs is more liquor. 

Johnny is fairly confident he’s having an actual, legitimate breakdown as he walks with Ten. Further from the fire, further from the safety net of distractions, until all they can hear are a few stray shouts speckling the quiet. It’s an internal breakdown. A dissolution of organs. No, he doesn’t think he’s being melodramatic. 

Ten keeps his eyes trained on the ground. “I don’t see – “

“There’s no crab, I just wanted to talk to you.” Johnny spits out the words like they’re poisonous, like they’ll harm him if he keeps them in his mouth for too long. 

Ten slows. A blink-and-you’ll-miss-it flare of doubt. He sits down and pats the spot next to him. “Okay. What did you want to talk about?”

Ten is looking at him expectantly and Johnny guesses this is it. Any excuse he could bullshit at this point for why he pulled Ten away from the drunken din could never pass as believable.

Unintentionally, “I’m sorry” is the first phrase out of his mouth.

Ten looks worried, eyes all over Johnny as if searching for bodily harm. “Sorry for what?”

Johnny clings desperately to the overused, now-useless logic that if he does this, everything will be over. He’ll have irreparably damaged the most important thing in his life. It’s too late now, but he can’t help spending these final moments contemplating the choice he’ll soon have to make between a friendship spent looking at Ten’s pitying face or no friendship at all.

“Sorry about what?” Ten repeats. “Johnny, what’s going on?”

“I’m really sorry that I’m about to fuck everything up.” Ten’s look of alarm is enough to force Johnny onward. He’s rehearsed this before. Mouthed eloquent words to himself while he lathered in his shampoo in the shower, crafted sturdy sentences in his mind while he spaced off in class. He can’t remember a word of it. He wishes there was someone he could shout to offstage. _“Line?”_

Unrehearsed, unceremonious, sloppy, Johnny says it. “I love you. Not like we always say. Not like a friend. Well, yes like a friend but like other stuff besides friends too. Like I feel nauseous every time I have to meet one of your boyfriends. Like I feel unhinged when you smile at me.”  
“How long.” Ten cuts him off. Johnny assumes he does it out of mercy, so he can’t embarrass himself any further.

“What? I don’t know.”

“Johnny. For how long.”

“Since we were twelve.”

“Johnny, what the fuck.” Ten lets all the air out of his lungs in a breathy, incredulous laugh. “Why do you think I broke up with every boyfriend I ever had after like a month? None of them were you. I wanted you. So badly. I wanted you.”

This doesn’t register. Johnny feels the way he does when he reads some fact about distance in space: _Pluto is 3,670,050,000 miles from the Sun_. Impossible to grasp. Too ridiculous to be true. “I don’t know, I thought. I guess I thought –” Johnny has no idea what he thought. 

Ten is laughing. Fizzy, uncontrollable laughter. Relieved laughter. He keeps saying things that don’t make sense. “You _idiot_. You’re the one who made me realize I wasn’t straight in the first place” …“wish you’d told me this eight years ago” … “you left me to agonize over this for-fucking-ever, god, I can’t believe this.”

There’s a kiss, but Johnny barely feels it. He feels like he’s watching something happen to someone else. Feels like he’s intruding on someone else’s body. Maybe Ten has him confused for someone else, doesn’t realize it’s Johnny in the body attached to the lips he’s kissing.

He’s always thought that Ten seems something like a palm frond. All the grace of wind and wisp. Delicate, enduring. And now Ten is straddling Johnny’s lap, Ten has his fingers laced through Johnny’s hair, Ten is trying and failing not to smile while kissing Johnny’s neck. Ten, Ten, Ten. And suddenly, it does make sense.

~*~

Jaehyun is at the stage of drunk where he can feel his pulse in his fingertips, can feel his blood pushing up against the inside of his skin. Pyrotechnics to match the snap of bonfire sparks. Ash and collapsed wood.

He can see Johnny and Ten walking back towards the fire, and he squints as if that will help him discern their expressions in the dark. But then his eyes fall to their connected hands, then they’re close enough that he can see their upturned lips, then he’s whooping. 

Most of them start whooping with him without understanding what they’re whooping about. Doyoung, sober, is the first one to put the pieces together. “Oh my god” he says. 

“Oh my god” Taeyong repeats, giggling like it’s the funniest thing he’s ever heard, falling into Jaehyun’s shoulder. “Oh my god!” 

“No, look.” Jaehyun points to Johnny and Ten, close enough to feel the fire’s heat again. 

“Oh my god.” Taeyong straightens up. 

The celebration of the end of the week abruptly becomes the celebration of something much more monumental. 

“Finally,” Yuta says, attempting to sound blasé, but fracturing the illusion when he rises to hug them both. There’s a flurry of embraces, exclamations, a few tears (Taeyong) and all Jaehyun knows is that he’s so happy that this happened here. 

He could walk a few minutes down the coast and find the spot where he confessed to Taeyong, walk just a couple hundred yards in the opposite direction and stand in the spot where Johnny confessed to Ten. This place is undeniably theirs. 

Jaehyun loves having sand in his mouth and salt in his hangnail and sun in his eyes because it means he’s home. They’re all suspended in the strange liminality that is college life: their dorms and apartments are transitory and their childhood homes expect their absence, bedrooms converted into offices and families falling into new rhythms. Every place that might be called home is temporary or outgrown, but this little patch of beach is permanent and here, Jaehyun is ageless. 

They all are. He looks across the circle at Ten hiding behind Johnny’s shoulder, pretending to be bashful at all the attention. Things begin on this beach, but things never really end on this beach. Time swells ahead of them, hazy but gold. Their invincibility is more logical than anything else, really. The fear is only an afterthought.

**Author's Note:**

> this is my first fic: comments/suggestions/constructive criticisms/miscellaneous thoughts are all welcomed and appreciated! i'm @cherriestaeil on tumblr. come say hi, if ya dig.


End file.
